Dickens, who had brought tears and laughter into every household from the Atlantic to the Missouri river, who was loved in the free States as few writers have been loved, might have been expected from his vehement denunciation of slavery in the American Notes to see, now that the battle was joined, that the right would prevail. Yet when a friend of his returning from America in the spring of 1863 said that the North would ultimately triumph, he treated this opinion as a harmless hallucination. Indirectly and undesignedly he was a contributing cause to the view which the English higher classes took of the North, for his caricatures in Martin Chuzzlewit came to be regarded as a true portrayal of the character of the men and women who were now risking all for unity and freedom. But Anthony Trollope had an assured confidence that the North would win.1 And Tennyson, the poet of the people, though filled with conventional horror at the war, was inspired by the hope of the abolition of slavery and used to sing with enthusiasm,

The most significant feature in the aspect of English sentiment during the spring of 1863 is the feeling of our friends that our cause was utterly hopeless. Queen Victoria and Disraeli were certain that the Union could not be